Hello Everyone! We are excited to share our tailor-made needle felted cat key ring with you!It is our first custom order request. Although we had made a lot of dolls before, tailor-made dolls are still a learning process to us! This time, with the help from the customer on sending us all the photos of different dimensions of the lovely cat, we finally can combine the cuteness element from Sweet Pea Dolls with the actual look of the cat. Moreover, it is a Christmas key ring gift to his friend, so it is just 8cm long! Such a tiny sweet one!We are grateful that our customer feel satisfied with our little cat and delighted that our needle felted creation can bring happiness and fun to the others! We are looking forward to our next tailor-made order! Merry Christmas to you all!!The front side:​

In our previous post, we introduced a new project to create a cat Kokeshi doll! Combining our love of cats and Japanese culture, it has been great fun to make her!

​Last week, Hana was born! She is a sweet cat and she loves to sniff the flowers in the garden! She has a stylish red kimono with pink and yellow flowers, to complement her pretty kanzashi style hair accessory!

​Would you like to add Hana to your family? She can be purchased by clicking here!​Hope everyone is having a lovely day! :)

Although we haven’t updated our diary for a while, we are still working on our needle felting dolls creation.

Actually we are planning our 3rd trip to Japan in 2017. Ali and I find Japanese culture fascinating and we put our passion to Japanese culture into our handmade wool felt dolls. So, our Kokeshi dolls series were launched and we received a lot of positive feedback on this range. Thanks a lot for all of your support.

For increasing the variety and injecting the fun element into our dolls range, we are working on the Kokeshi CAT! Yes, that’s right. Combining our love for cats and passion to Kokeshi to form our new creation!! Also in Japan, cats are very much loved, so it adds to the meaning of our creation!

Although we haven’t finished the whole doll yet, we are excited to show you some of the pictures of our Kokeshi cat below and let you to see the progress!

We will add a new post when she is complete! :)

The picture from our 1st Japan trip in 2011. There are 3 kokeshi dolls with beautiful kimono m,ade from Japanese fabrics. So pretty! :D

Please feel free to let us know your comments and questions, and we will look forward to replying you! :D

​Hope you had a great time making our penguin plush toy! Today, it's time for the second edition in our needle felting tutorials! We're going to show you how to make a cute lion plush toy, which like the penguin, can also be made into a keyring! The benefits of this are that lions are brilliant at safeguarding things, so your keys will be very safe indeed! Equally, this lovely handmade toy will be a great little accessory to hang on your bag or in your car!

All of the felting materials for this doll can be found in our sweet pea store and we will leave links to those at the bottom of this post! If you would like any further tips or help on making the doll, please dont be shy! Leave your comments below, or email us at sweetpeadolls@icloud.com we will be so happy to help you! 👍😊

Safety advice: Felting needles are extremely sharp! Never poke too close to your fingers, and make sure children are always supervised by an adult.

​1. Take a piece of core wool and roll it into a ball. Initially, use your 36 needle to begin poking evenly around the ball to bring the fibres together. Use your hands to keep moulding it into a round ball shape and switch to your 40 needle to continue poking. Repeat this until you reach your desired firmness. There is no right or wrong to how firm it should be, just down to personal preference, however if it is too soft, it will make the later stages more difficult to do neatly. ​

2. Take some yellow wool roving, wrap it around the ball, and use your 40 needle to poke the wool so that it affixes to the surface. To make it easier, use your thumb and index finger to hold the wool tight as you poke it, this will make it easier to create a smooth surface. (Never poke too close to your fingers, needles are very very sharp!) Continue covering with white wool until fully covered.

3. Use some drawing pins to mark the position for the Lion's eyes, trying to ensure they are level.

​4. Take some white merino wool roving, using your 40 needle, poke it into a triangle shape, and attach to the doll as seen in picture 4. When attaching the wool like this, make sure to poke it in the centre first to get it attached and then work outwards to the edges. This way you can neaten the edges at the end, to get that triangle shape you are looking for.

5. In much the same method as the previous step, take some black merino wool roving and use your 46 needle to affix onto the white triangle as shown in picture 5.

6. Roll a small piece of black wool between your fingers to create a thin line. It's surprising how little wool is needed to do this, if you get it too thick to begin with, just pull some of the fibres out, then re-roll and cut to size. Once you've got your piece ready, use your 46 needle to attach to the doll as shown in picture 6.

​7. Take very small amounts of black merino wool, and roll between your fingers to create 6 black dots. Again, if they are too big to start with, just tear apart and re-roll.

8. Use your 46 needle to attach to the doll as per the pattern shown in picture 8.

9. Take 2 small pieces of black wool, roll between your fingers into a small ball shape and poke lightly to firm up using your 40 needle.

10. Use the pins to hold the black circles in place before you attach them to the doll.

​11. One at a time, use your 46 needle to attach to the Lion. As before, try to attach by poking in the middle first, and then neaten the edges by lightly poking around the circumference to create a smooth round shape

12. Great job, looking good everyone! Let's add some lion hair!!!

​13. Take out your "fiery oranges" blended merino wool! This wool is just great for the lion hair colour! Using your thumb and finger, take several pieces of wool ready to attach to the doll. To create a fluffy and hairy effect, using your 40 needle, just poke the wool into the doll at one end, leaving the other end untouched.

14. Working your way around the lion's head in a circle as shown in picture 14.

15. Take more pieces of fiery oranges wool, to fully cover the back.

16. There you go!! Your very own handmade Lion plush toy! Well done!😃😃😃

Optional extra- Add a keyring/keychain or another hanging accessory

17. To turn your lion plushie into a keyring or hanging adornment, firstly you will need to create a hole in the top of the doll. This can be done using a bradawl or other sharp pointy tool!

​18. Into that hole, glue a pin with a loop. Allow time for the glue to set firm before attaching anything to the loop.

19. While the glue is setting, take out your keyring, or hanging accessory. For this tutorial, we are going to use a keyring. We also have a small bendable connecting loop, which may or may not be necessary depending on the accessory that you have.

​20. Optionally, you may like to add some beads or crystals to embellish your keyring further.

21. Simply connect up your keyring with your lion! Wonderful, all done! Your own handmade lion keyring! Thanks so much for reading and making with us! If you would like any further help or tips please do feel free to contact us, we love to help you!

For felting supplies required to make this lion, please follow the below links. Our smallest size bag of each of the wools would be more than enough to make this doll. Please note that the yellow wool we used in this particular tutorial is from one of our old packs, and the tone is slightly lighter/paler than the yellow wool we currently stock. If you would like the exact shade of yellow, we will be happy to help you source it from our friends!

​At this moment we don't stock any keyrings or beads but these can be easily found either in your local haberdashery or online at sites like eBay.

We hope you are all having a great start to 2016! It's time for us to reboot the blog! Something we have always wanted to do here is to post a series of tutorials to help inspire our fellow needle felters for the next handcraft project! This is our first tutorial, so we've chosen to do a cute penguin plush toy, to which you can attach a keyring for hanging on your backpack, in your car, or maybe just to safeguard your keys! Equally, if you didnt want to attach a keyring, this lightweight plushie will sit beautifully in the palm of your hand and make a wonderful companion to take away your worries and bring a smile to your face.

All of the felting materials for this doll can be found in our sweet pea store and we will leave links to those at the bottom of this post! If you would like any further tips or help on making the doll, please dont be shy! Leave your comments below, or email us at sweetpeadolls@icloud.com we will be very happy to help you!

Felting needles are extremely sharp! Never poke too close to your fingers, and make sure children are always supervised by an adult.

1. Take a piece of core wool and roll it into a ball. Initially, use your 36 needle to begin poking evenly around the ball to bring the fibres together. Use your hands to keep moulding it into a round ball shape and switch to your 40 needle to continue poking. Repeat this until you reach your desired firmness. There is no right or wrong to how firm it should be, just down to personal preference, however if it is too soft, it will make the later stages more difficult to do neatly.

​2. Take some white wool roving, wrap it around the ball, and use your 40 needle to poke the wool so that it affixes to the surface. To make it easier, use your thumb and index finger to hold the wool tight as you poke it, this will make it easier to create a smooth surface. (Never poke too close to your fingers, needles are very very sharp!) Continue covering with white wool until fully covered.

3. Take a small piece of yellow wool roving, use your 40 needle to shape it into a small triangle, and continue poking until it holds its shape.

4. Roll a few strands of black wool roving between your fingers, and use your 46 needle to affix a smile shape onto your yellow triangle.

​5. Affix this triangle onto the front of your white ball, using your 40 needle to poke until it is firmly attached.

6. Take some black wool roving and roll it between your fingers to create a line. Lay it on the doll in the pattern that you see in picture 6. If it is easier, use some drawing pins to hold the line in place, before using your 40 needle to poke it firmly onto the surface.

7. Take some more black wool roving, use your 40 needle to fill in the area behind the black outline, as you see in picture 7.

​8. Try to ensure that you don't cross the outline because when you poke black wool on top of white wool accidentally, it can sometimes be difficult to cover up. ( not impossible though, if it does happen, just take the black wool out as best as possible and use more white wool to cover the area)

​9. Once the area is completely covered, just lightly poke to make sure that it is firmly fixed, and smooth all over.

10. Use a couple of drawing pins to mark the position for the eyes of the penguin.

11. Roll 2 very small pieces of black wool between your fingers to create the eyes, and using your 40 needle, lightly poke to firm them.

​12. Place the eyes on the area marked by the pins, and re use the pins to hold them there. This will make them easier to affix without them moving.

​13. Use your 46 needle to poke the eyes so that they are tightly fixed to the doll.

Optional- adding the keyring

14. To turn this lovely plush penguin into a keyring, simply create a small hole in the top of the penguin, then insert and glue a pin with a loop.

15. Once the glue has had a chance to set, attach a keyring to the loop.

​16. Not a must, just personal preference, if you have some spare beads to add to the keyring, go ahead!

Hope you are keeping warm this winter! Or enjoying the summer, if you are in that particular part of the world!!

At Sweet Pea Dolls, we started off by making needle felted items, using a dry felting technique in which you repeatedly poke the wool thousands of times to create the shape you want, and add colours on top for the decoration. Most of our items are made this way, but since we have entered a new year, we are interested in exploring more ways to make beautiful items, that can compliment our dry felted items.

As needle felters, the most obvious choice was to start making wet felted items to add to the range in our shop! Wet felted items involve using merino wool,, warm water and soap to create a very smooth finish to the surface of the item. We chose to use this technique to make a purse because every girl likes a stylish purse, right?!

In order to make the purse, we use a large polystyrene ball, and lightly poke a coloured wool around the entire surface of the ball. This will form the inside of the purse. On top of that, we add a coloured merino wool, which totally covers the surface, and this forms the outside of the purse. It has to be merino wool to use the wet felting technique successfully. After doing this, we put the ball into a sealable plastic bag and add some warm soapy water. It doesnt have to have too much soap, just a little should do fine! Making sure the bag is sealed, (and best done over a sink!), we rub the soapy water into the ball, evenly around the entire ball for 10-15 mins, until it becomes very smooth. At this point we can take it out and dry it so that we can make a cut into the top of the ball. This will form the opening of the bag. After making the cut, we take the polystyrene ball out, and insert a smaller polystyrene ball. After doing this, we re-wash it in the soapy water for another 10-15 mins, as this helps to shrink the wool down to the size of the smaller ball, thus making it stronger and tighter. After doing that, and drying the ball again, we are ready to attach the clip for opening the ball. This is simply done by stitching it through the holes of the clip. And there you go, your very own wet felted purse!

"But wait, what if I want to add some decoration?" Well, that is the most fun part of the entire process!! You can use dry felting to add any decoration you like onto the surface of your new purse!! We made one purple one, with a simple polka dot design, and another with our Sweet Pea Dolls style flowers!

So, if you're looking for new ideas on a handmade project, we can suggest wet felting to you!! For more specific details on how to make these little purses, please send us an email through our contact us page, and we will be delighted to help you!!

We would like to begin our first post of 2015 by wishing everyone a happy new year 2015!! We hope you all had a wonderful Christmas time, and that good luck comes your way in this year!

A lot has happened since our last post, and we would like to share those things with you, and show you some of our pictures and new items too!

Given the popularity of our needle felted Kokeshi dolls, we have been continuing to make more, and have taken some interesting photos of their travels! In the new year we will be continuing to make more, so keep your eyes out for new photos!!

In December, we held a Christmas gift lucky prize draw on Instagram,, as a way of saying thank you to all our wonderful supporters! We thought first about what the gift should be, and then decided on a snowman keyring! We can happily announce that our Gift was won by Kang Bo Mi of South Korea. She has some really cool photos, you can check out her instagram page @ppom_k! Luckily the gift arrived just in time for Christmas!

Also in December, we ran an interactive event on Instagram,, for people to name our Korean doll! To whoever chose our favourite name, we would give a discount coupon for 2015! We love to get people involved with our dolls, its so much fun for us too, and we had so many wonderful suggestions! But in the end, we were taken by the suggestion of 춘향 Chun Hyang provided by @zoe_heejung and @artist_sung! 춘향 is a character from a famous old Korean novel and was a perfect fit for our lovely doll!

So, moving on to the new year 2015! We will continue to put all our love into making more felted dolls and accessories, and hope we can provide more people with happiness through our creations1 We also hope to be the providers of special gifts for people around the world! We hope to run more interactive events through our social media outlets, Instagram and Facebook, for which you can access via our contact us page!

In terms of the items we will be making this year, well, part of the fun is waiting to see, but we will be using Swarovski crystals In more of our items, to add an extra special sparkle. The shine from a Swarovski is special, and we think it makes a wonderful addition to our wool based creations!

Additionally, we hope to have some exciting news to in the coming weeks, but we will leave it like that for now, just to keep you waiting!!!

Thank you all so much for supporting us! We feel so lucky to have such support from all around the world, and we hope we can continue to make you smile!!

How are you all doing? It has been a while since we wrote a new post, but we hope you're all going to enjoy this one! We are hard at work creating new dolls and accessories that we hope you will like, but recently we took a 5 day trip in Busan, South Korea. Not only did we travel, but a few of our dolls did too, and they liked what they saw! At the bottom of this post, you can find details for our Autumn promotion discount, but first heres a bit more about our Busan trip!

On the first evening, we met up with our friend Minhee Park, the winner of our free prize draw in Instagram, and gave her little brown bear magnet to her! Minhee has some wonderful photographs of Korea, so if you like, you can follow her on Instagram @_mh_p. We will be running another free prize draw before Christmas so be sure to follow us on Instagram too for details of that! ( @sweetpeadolls)

Our first full day took us to Taegukdo village (태국도마을) in Gamcheon-dong, and later on, to the Busan Tower in Yongdusan Park. Busan tower offers a fantastic 360 degree view over the city, while Taegukdo village has a very interesting background in that during the Korean War, many followers of the Taegukdo religion settled there, and what we find today remains relatively unchanged yet picturesque and colourful. This was certainly one of our doll's favourite places and they kept asking us to take pictures of them!

Our second day in Korea's second largest city was somewhat influenced by rain coming from the outer edges of a typhoon passing through Japan. Although we tried to take our dolls for a walk in the park, the attraction of the world's largest department store was too much for them and they just wanted to go shopping!

In the evening we took a visit to Gwangalli beach, the perfect spot to view the beautiful Gwangandaegyo (광아대교)!

Our third full day brought us to the Busan University, because Tiff needed to have some Korean style shopping!! Girls and accessories, you know, perfect match!! However after shopping, we visited the stunning Beomeosa (범어사) temple, which was first built in the year 678! It was lost in the Japanese invasion of 1592, but renovated in 1713 and remains the same to this day! This presented Tiffany (already in accessories mode) to model our needle felted butterfly hair clip!

On our final day, we visited Taejongdae (태종대), a coastal area of Busan, with beautiful panoramic views of the East Sea! This was undoubtedly our dolls' favourite place, and we have concluded it was ours too! The mountain road we walked along gave us many opportunities to stop and take some nice pictures, and here's a few featuring our happy dolls, and our hair accessories! In addition weve included a few from other places in the trip!

We had such a wonderful time in Korea, and we would like to share our happiness with you!! To anyone reading this post, we are running an Autumn promotion especially for you! For all dolls and accessories in our shop, including those featured in our Busan trip, we are offering you a 10% discount coupon! To activate this, simply type BUSAN14 into the 'apply shop coupon code' section (above item total) and then click apply! We are running this offer until Saturday 15th November 2014 so dont miss out! :)

Thank you very much for reading all about our trip! And if you wish to get in touch with us, please feel free to leave your comments below, or send us an email to sweetpeadolls@icloud.com . Alternatively be sure to like us on facebook, and follow us on Instagram for the latest updates!!

How are you enjoying the spring time where you are? We would love to hear all about how spring is where you are, the flowers you see, the temperatures, seasonal foods and so on. It's fascinating to us to learn about different places, and we'd be delighted if you can leave your comments below!

They might just offer us inspiration for our next item! :) Keeping on with the spring theme, we recently made a monarch butterfly which is attached to a hair clip, so that it can be worn as a hair accessory for ladies! However the butterfly took a trip around our garden first, and in the photo below you can see a collage of his journey!

At home here, we've been sowing some seeds in pots, keeping them watered and having seen the green shoots coming up, we're now eagerly anticipating the first flowers! One of the seeds we decided to grow, were 'British Wild Flowers', they have a wonderful array of colours and look great as a display at home! We took this inspiration into our needle felted window box of wild flowers, which you can see below!

Moving on to more of a summer theme, we're delighted to say that we have just introduced a new line of needle felted accessories for ladies. Our colourful and cute charms can be worn on a necklace or bracelet, and their uniqueness makes them a wonderful gift idea, whether for your special lady, your mother, or your best friend! Our first two, a little cake and an iced donut can be seen below, and there will be more to come!

Finally, we would like to introduce you to our friend's website! She is 張摸摸 from Taiwan, a massive K-Pop fan who creates a variety of handmade items. The K-Pop items are super cool, so please go and take a look at www.tinymomo.weebly.com!

We're well into spring now, and with the temperatures picking up both in Hong Kong and in the UK, the flowers are starting to come out, the birds are singing happily and the sunshine has a real feeling of warmth at last!

At Sweet Pea Dolls, we take inspiration from the seasonal changes, and we wanted to explain how that inspiration has led into some of our latest creations!

Spring announced itself about a month ago, when daffodils started flowering everywhere, and that really was the catalyst for the Easter egg with a daffodil as mentioned in the previous blog post. However at this time, another famous seasonal flower is producing stunning displays of colour across Japan and Korea, both countries we have a particular affinity to. That flower is the cherry blossom known as さくら (sakura) in Japan, and 벚꽃 (Beot Kkot) in Korea. It flowers earliest in the southernmost regions and gradually comes into flower further and further north as the weeks pass. Currently they have just come into bloom in Kanazawa and are expected to open in Sapporo as late as May 3rd! Hanami is the Japanese for "Flower Viewing" and it refers most often to those who go to see the cherry blossom. There is even a cherry blossom forecast as most families will have a day out for hanami, and will have a picnic under the trees! We really wanted to incorporate this into a creation, so we made another Easter egg with a cherry blossom tree! It can be displayed in many different ways and is a wonderful way to bring a bit of Asia into your home! Below you can see a photo of the egg!

As the weather has been improving, the sound of birdsong has also! Frequently in the garden one sees robins and also bluetits with their unmistakeable yellow breast, green and blue wings and silvery grey feet! Their bright colours evoke the thought of spring and that's why we really wanted to make one that could bring that sense of life and vivid colour when displayed as a decoration in any home! Our bluetit took a trip around the garden and here's some of the places he visited!

With our line of needle felted accessories for ladies being such a key part of our brand, the vivacity of spring is something which offers us great inspiration to create accessories that are not only seasonal, but also unique and help ladies to stand out from the crowd and attract countless compliments!

Since the various flowers offer up such a burst of different colours, a pretty multi-coloured flower is our way of bringing that into a product, however we wanted to take it a step further so we added a green leaf which represents the sense of growth and new life which is taking place.

With the increased temperatures comes more sunshine, so we couldn't resist making a red heart hair clip featuring one of our heart-shaped Swarovski crystals, which is sure to shine beautifully under the sunlight!

We hope you enjoy our spring inspired creations as much as we've enjoyed making them! If you would like to see these items in our store, please click the link below, and you will be directed to the shop! If you have any questions, please feel free to get in touch with us via our contact us page and we will be delighted to help you!